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Rabbi Matia ben Heresh, a second-century Tanna who founded a Torah academy in Rome during the age of the later Roman emperors, was known among his peers for an almost iron constanc...
Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, the sage who rescued Torah study from the ashes of Jerusalem's destruction in 70 CE by founding the academy at Yavneh, once taught that in the future, wh...
King Manasseh of Judah reigned fifty-five years, longer than any other king of David's line, and the book of Kings accuses him of a staggering catalog of evils (2 Kings 21:1-18). H...
The Midrash of the Ten Commandments, a medieval midrashic anthology organized around the Decalogue that was popular in Jewish communities from Spain to Yemen in the eleventh and tw...
The Talmud preserves a strange tradition about how Rome came to be. When Solomon married the daughter of Pharaoh — a politically brilliant match that would one day haunt the house ...
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi was one of the great Sages of the third-century Land of Israel, and the Talmud reports that he had a personal acquaintance with the Angel of Death — a rarity ...
A pious man was walking along the shore of Haifa, the harbor city on the Mediterranean coast of the Galilee. As he walked he was thinking about a rabbinic tradition — a well-known ...
Every day three choirs of ministering angels stand before the throne and sing. The first class sings, "Holy!" The second answers, "Holy!" The third completes the line: "Holy is the...
Benjamin the Righteous was the keeper of the communal poor-box in his city. He had one job: to guard the coins and give them out to the hungry. In a year of famine a woman came to ...
When Israel came out of Egypt and stood at the shore of the Reed Sea, Samael — the angel who serves as heavenly prosecutor — rose up to accuse them. "Lord of the Universe," Samael ...
The son of Rabbi Reuben the Libellarius was being married. The feast was in full swing. The music was loud, the wine was generous, and the family was radiant. An old stranger came ...
King Solomon had two trusted secretaries, Eliharaf and Ahijah, the sons of Shisha. One morning, as they entered the throne room to begin their duties, they noticed something that c...
Toward the end of his reign, David was asked by the Holy One to choose a punishment for the chain of disasters his decisions had caused — the slaughter of the priestly city of Nob,...
Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua ben Ilem were walking toward Jerusalem on pilgrimage when they saw something few human eyes ever see: an angel, flying low over the road, carrying a ...
And it came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham (Genesis 22:1). Rabbi Yochanan, speaking in the name of Rabbi Yossi ben Zimra, asks in Sanhedrin 89b: after what thin...
The Roman official had one cup too many set before him, and his face twisted unnaturally. A Rabbi knew the cure — rearrange the cups so the even number became odd, and the face wou...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 140, tells the tale in a handful of sentences — which is precisely its horror. The two sons of Rabbi Reuben ben Astribulos lived in Tiberias. One day w...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 255, remembers a forgotten act of judicial courage. King Yannai — the Hasmonean monarch — had a servant who had committed murder. Jewish law is uncompr...
When Moses ascended to receive the Torah (Exodus 19), an angel stood at the gate of Heaven and refused him entry. "This is not your place," the angel said. "You are made of earth. ...
A Roman emperor once boasted to Rabbi Joshua ben Chananiah that he wished to throw a banquet large enough to entertain the God of Israel. The rabbi looked at him gravely and said, ...
Ben Sabar was a man famous for his tzedakah. When word came that a poor couple in a distant town needed money for their wedding, he packed a sack of coin and set out without hesita...
Tractate Shabbat (folio 66, column 2) preserves something most modern readers will find startling: a rabbinic prescription against fever that is half incantation, half midrash. The...
The midrash on Abraham's hospitality in Genesis 18 notices something small and opens it into a whole theology. The patriarch had just made a covenant with the peoples of the land. ...
Gaster's exemplum No. 333 tells a longer, stranger story of Mar Ukva — the same Babylonian exilarch celebrated for his secret charity — before he became the man of secret charity. ...
When Sennacherib the Assyrian emperor came against Jerusalem, his pride was as tall as his army. The midrash tells how God humbled him in a sequence of ordinary-seeming errands. Fi...
Shechem son of Hamor once assembled a troupe of girls with tambourines to play outside the tent of Dinah, and when she "went out to see them" (Genesis 34:1), he carried her off. Fr...
Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa once preached a sermon on the rabbinic teaching "Receive every man as a friend" — every stranger, every wayfarer, every unknown face at your door. He finishe...
The sages taught a secret about Friday night that changes the way you walk home from synagogue. Every Jew is escorted by two angels — one good, one evil — who follow him from the B...
There is a story in Ketubot 77b about a rabbi who asked for a preview of his own Paradise. The Angel of Death had come for him, as the Angel comes for everyone, but this rabbi had ...
The Rabbis gave practical instructions for living in a town visited by plague. When pestilence walks the streets, do not walk down the middle of the road. The middle is where the a...
When the Torah laid out the rules for Israel's king, it gave three specific warnings. In Deuteronomy 17, Moses wrote that the king shall not acquire for himself many horses. He sha...
A merchant on the road was joined by an innkeeper who asked to travel with him. As they walked, they passed a blind man by the roadside. The merchant stopped, opened his purse, and...
Rabbi Yochanan was teaching his students on the verse, “I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles” (Isaiah 54:12). He said, “The Holy One, bl...
Elijah the Tishbite once appeared to Rav Yehudah, brother of Rav Salla the Holy, and the prophet asked him a question that could only come from a man who walked between worlds: &ld...
The strangest word in the Torah's creation account is "us." "Let us make man in our image." The rabbis have spilled rivers of ink explaining who God was talking to. Targum Pseudo-J...
The Torah says Eve saw the tree was good for food. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:6) tells us she also saw something else. "The woman beheld Samael, the angel of death, and w...
Just as God consulted the angels to make humanity, He consults them again to remove humanity from paradise. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:22) records the divine deliberation...
The Torah says cryptically of Enoch: "he walked with God; and he was not, for God took him" (Genesis 5:24). Targum Pseudo-Jonathan tells us where he went. "Hanok served in the trut...
One of the Torah's most mysterious verses, (Genesis 6:2), talks about "the sons of God" taking "the daughters of men." The Targumist keeps the image but sharpens it. Targum Pseudo-...
The enigmatic "Nephilim" of (Genesis 6:4) get names in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan. "Schamchazai and Uzziel, who fell from heaven, were on the earth in those days." These are the Watche...
How did every species find the ark? Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 6:20) gives an answer the Torah does not. "Of the fowl after its kind, and of all cattle after its kind, and ...
The plain verse in (Genesis 11:7) says only, Come, let us go down. The plural has troubled readers since antiquity. To whom is God speaking? Targum Pseudo-Jonathan answers without ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 11:8) does not describe a gentle scattering. It describes a massacre. The Word of the Lord — the Memra, that favorite Targumic circumlocution for...
In the wilderness, Hagar meets an angel. And the angel does what angels rarely do — he names a child. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 16:11) keeps the name-meaning the Hebrew en...
The angel does not just name Ishmael. He predicts him. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 16:12) lets the prophecy roll out in the open: he shall be like the wild ass among men, hi...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 18:2) gives the three visitors at Abraham's tent their heavenly job descriptions. They are angels in the likeness of men, the Targum says, and th...
(Genesis 18:8) contains one of the Torah's most curious moments, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan renders it with an almost comic precision. Abraham takes rich cream, milk, and the calf ...
The Hebrew says simply that Sarah was listening at the tent door. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 18:10) puts a second listener behind her. And Sarah was hearkening at the door ...
